Whisper of Winter

SATB double choir 5’10”

Russet ribbons and
Amber light on auburn leaves
Whisper of winter.

An inspiration –
Draw in breath and let the air
fill my heart with song.

Pale green against browns,
In a sea of bare branches
Remembrance of Spring.

A lone leaf remains
Clinging through torrents and gales,
Brave at break of day

Glistening in dawn light,
Blue skies over pale shadows,
Gently surrenders.

Silent sentinels
Waiting, whispering, wind-whipped
Swiftly swirling snow.

The expiration –
I give it back to the wind
the warmth of my soul.

Haikus from Cycle of Seasons (2023),
Sandy Coffin

words by Kenneth Tay

This piece brings together a series of haiku written by my friend Sandy Coffin, alongside two of my own. Sandy has generously allowed me to set her poems, in which the turn from autumn toward winter is felt in the air. I hear this shift as a breathing gesture, where autumn gathers the year’s remaining warmth and fullness; winter answers as a long release, when the energy and harvest that has been stored is given back, perhaps as a final breath. My pair of haiku reflects on this cycle, connecting to ideas of pneuma, spiritus, and ruach, in which breath, spirit, and wind are conceptually intertwined.

The music broadly follows a ternary ABA form, where in the outer A sections, the tenors and basses of the double choir sustain an ostinato drone of interlocking fifths, creating a steady underpinning over which the treble voices develop the melodic ideas. At the centre, the double choir begins in canon, one bar apart, forming bitonal and overlapping chord clusters, like two streams of breath moving together.

commissioned by the University of Glasgow Spheres of Singing Arts Lab.